Movie Review: Silent Night
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film as unrelentingly mean and ugly as Silent Night. Action maestro John Woo’s return to Hollywood filmmaking after twenty years away is one of the year’s most stunning disappointments, a cruel slog with plenty of bullets and blood but none of the soul for which Woo was once famous.
Joel Kinnaman is Brian Godlock, a man whose young son was struck and killed by a stray bullet from a gang fight on Christmas Day in the front yard of their California home. In the film’s opening sequence, Godlock chases the gang members down but is shot in the throat and left for dead. He doesn’t die, but his voice is stolen from him. Over the course of the year, the formerly mild-mannered electrician bulks up and turns himself into a lethal weapon, ready to go out and kill the entire gang on Christmas Eve.
It’s not a bad premise for a film, and one can see why it might seem like a perfect project for Woo, whose best films balanced bone-shattering ballistics with operatic sensibilities and high emotion. His early Hong Kong films, from A Better Tomorrow to The Killer and Hard Boiled interspersed their explosions and shootouts with deeply felt themes of honor, loyalty, and friendship. His best American film, 1997’s Face/Off, also opened with a father experiencing the death of his son, and its high point included a gunfight viewed through the eyes of a child while “Over the Rainbow” played on the soundtrack.
And Kinnaman is effective as a grieving, angry father, so intent on revenge that it eventually costs him his marriage (poor Catalina Sandino Morena, who plays his wife, is relegated to nothing more than casting disapproving looks from the kitchen). Working from a script by Robert Lynn Archer, Woo tells the story without any dialogue, and he ramps up the emotion and theatrics to predictably high levels (a shot where a woman’s falling tear is matched by an edit to a falling bullet is pure Woo).
The dialogue-free concept – done much better in this year’s No One Will Save You – would work if the high emotion were matched by similarly florid action moments. But Woo chooses to shoot the numerous car fights, knife fights, and gun fights with a gritty, realistic look, spilling blood over the screen and focusing on extreme carnage. Despite its title, there’s no attempt to leaven the material with any Christmas aesthetics or music; instead, the action scenes take place in scuzzy, yellow-filtered California sunlight and what should be something fun turns into something bitter, angry, and ugly. The dramatic portions, in contrast, feel over the top and silly, and the choice to have all the non-Kinnaman characters also communicate silently turns it into a weird piece of mime craft that elicits laughs instead of tears.
Woo still knows his way around an action sequence; there’s a brutal car chase and a gunfight in a stairwell that both showcase his knack for dealing on-screen death. But decades after his peak, Woo’s been lapped by movies like John Wick which are similarly brutal but more graceful, stylistic and intense. The “Wick” films and movies like Nobody understand the importance of encasing their over-the-top violence in a mythology just left of the real world in order to make the violence believable but also sidestep the ickiness of celebrating a lone man with a loaded gun taking justice into his own hands. Silent Night has none of that; it’s a celebration of a mass killer.
Joel Kinnaman in “Silent Night.” Photo by Lionsgate – © Lionsgate.
Adding to the problems is the film’s disinterest in spending much time developing any character outside of Kinnaman. Kid Kudi shows up as a detective who, in a better Woo film, would develop a rapport and uneasy friendship with the vigilante. But Kudi’s off-screen for most of the movie and only brought back in for the finale, at which point he’s simply trying to clean up Godlock’s mess. Whereas Woo used to lavish just as much attention on his antagonists, turning them into conflicted characters, here, his villains are stereotypical gangsters and drug lords. A great deal of time in the third act is spent watching the Big Bad slow dance with his drugged-up girlfriend under balloons that look like skulls.
That, of course, means that Silent Night is, from an optical level, a movie that wants audiences to cheer on an angry white man as he kills a bunch of Latinos, something that I can’t believe Woo – an action director usually known for this sensitivity – or a studio like Lionsgate would push forward. It’s gross and brutal, and while its action may periodically be impressive, it’s in the service of delivering something mean-spirited, regressive, and ugly. It’s Death Wish for a new generation; and we didn’t need another Death Wish.
